PHP library for accessing NOAA's National Weather Service.

Using the free REST API provided by the National Weather Service should be straightforward enough - except it isn't. The results are overly convoluted - made to be read by machines, not humans. The purpose of this library is to make all that easier by doing all the hard work for you - it takes a latitude and longitude and gives back a nicely formatted object with all the weather data you need.

Requires PHP 5.3 (uses namespaces). Written by Cristian Radu, http://cristianradu.com/. MIT licensed, see the LICENSE file for details.

// set your values for latitude and longitude
$lat  =  40.75;
$long = -73.92;

// instantiate the library
$simpleNWS = new SimpleNWS($lat, $long);

// get the forecast (for today in this example)
$forecast = $simpleNWS->getForecastForToday();

// extract the data that you need
$apparentTemperature = $forecast->getHourlyApparentTemperature();

Alternate use: if you prefer, you can pass the latitude and longitude parameters to the forecast function instead of the library constructor:

$simpleNWS = new SimpleNWS();

$forecast = $simpleNWS->getForecastForToday($lat, $long);

Check out example.php for a complete list of use cases for the library.

After instantiating the library with the latitude and longitude, you can use one of the following self-explanatory methods to retrieve the weather forecast:

• getCurrentConditions()
• getForecastForToday()
• getForecastForWeek()

All the methods return a forecast model object. You can use the following methods to extract the desired weather data:

The resulted arrays will have a time layout timestamp as the key. The format is YYYY-MM-DD-HH. The intervals are determined by the method you used to extract the weather data (see the above table).

Example:

Array (
    [2011-08-21-20] => 78
    [2011-08-21-23] => 74
    [2011-08-22-02] => 70
    [2011-08-22-05] => 67
    [2011-08-22-08] => 68
    [2011-08-22-11] => 75
    [2011-08-22-14] => 80
    [2011-08-22-17] => 79
... )

Extracting the weather conditions will return a timestamped list of arrays containing the description of the weather:

Array (
    [2011-08-21-23] => Array (
        [weather_type] => thunderstorms
        [intensity] => heavy
        [coverage] => likely
        )
... )

You can convert any of the results in degrees Celsius by passing them through the convert method:

$degreesCelsius = $forecast->convertToCelsius($forecast->getHourlyRecordedTemperature());

That's it! Have fun using the library. For questions and comments drop me a line at [email protected]